The perfect job

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who'd pay $600 for a cell phone gets exactly what she deserves, especially if it falls into a puddle in the parking lot on the way out of the store. I'm not malicious--okay, maybe a teeny bit;schadenfreude is fun--but come on! It's a phone! Even if a pretty one.

Despite how attractive the products may be, I just don't relate to the iPhone fixation or any Apple mania. While there are three iPods in the house, including one with video, mine is the discontinued $29 Shuffle, a model so outmoded I'm surprised that Steve Jobs's Asian minions didn't scrape the logo off before they shipped it out. It's an item that this guy would have been thrilled to own a few years ago but horrified by today, and thus doesn't he--quoted here discussing today's surprise iPhone price drop-- have the absolutely perfect job? Perhaps someday he will cure himself.

"If they told me at the outset the iPhone would be $200 cheaper the next day, I would have thought about it for a second - and still bought it," said Andrew Brin, a 47-year-old addiction therapist in Los Angeles. "It was $600 and that was the price I was willing to pay for it."